11-29-2009
• Bloomberg
Mark Pittman, the award-winning
investigative reporter whose fight to open the Federal Reserve
to more scrutiny led Bloomberg News to sue the central bank and
win, died Nov. 25 in Yonkers, New York. He was 52.

Pittman suffered from heart-related illnesses. The precise
cause of his death wasn’t known, said his friend William Karesh,
vice president of the Global Health Program at the Bronx, New
York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

A former police-beat reporter who joined Bloomberg News in
1997, Pittman wrote stories in 2007 predicting the collapse of
the banking system. That year, he won the Gerald Loeb Award from
the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the highest accolade in
financial journalism, for “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain,” a
series of articles on the breakdown of the U.S. mortgage
industry.

“He was one of the great financial journalists of our
time,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University
in New York and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for
economics. “His death is shocking.”